Actions are said to be 'willed' if we consciously pay attention to their selection. It has been suggested that they are associated with activations in the dorsal prefrontal cortex (area 46). However, because previous experiments typically used a 'free selection' paradigm to examine this hypothesis, it is unclear whether the results reflected the attention to the selection of action or the freed...

Young infants actively gather information about their world through visual foraging, but the dynamics of this important behavior is poorly understood, partly because developmental scientists have often equated its essential components, looking and attending. Here we describe a method for simultaneously tracking spatial attention to fixated and nonfixated locations during free looking in 12-week...

This research investigated the effects of improvisational music therapy on joint attention behaviours in children with autistic spectrum disorder. The study was designed to look at these behaviours in two different conditions, improvisational music therapy and free play, and use both standardized tools and DVD analysis of sessions to evaluate changes in joint attention

The co-existence of deficits in sustained and spatial attention in patients with acquired damage to the right cerebral hemisphere has led to the proposition that sustained attention could be a marker for left spatial inattention, or neglect. We investigated the possibility that reductions in leftward spatial attentional asymmetries could arise from individual differences in the capacity for sus...

A new collection of pseudo-words was recorded from a single female speaker of American English for use in multi-talker speech intelligibility research. The pseudo-words (known as the KARG collection) consist of three groups of single syllable pseudo-words varying only by the initial phoneme. The KARG method allows speech intelligibility to be studied free of the influence of shifts of spatial a...

objectives: the purpose of the present study was comparing visuo-spatial attention between children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder-inattentive (adhd-i) type and normal children. methods: in this cross-sectional study fifteen (7-10 years of age) children were classified with adhd-i type and 15 normal children were matched for age, sex, and iq. they were selected trough simple rand...

To investigate how we orient our spatial attention, previous studies have recorded neural activity while participants are instructed where to attend. Here we contrast this classical instructed attention condition with a novel condition in which the focus of voluntary attention is not specified by the experimenter but rather is freely chosen by the participant. Central cues prompted fixating par...

Studies indicate an attentional bias towards food in binge-eating disorder (BED); however, more evidence on attentional engagement and disengagement and processing of multiple attention-competing stimuli is needed. This study aimed to examine visual attention to food and non-food stimuli in BED. In n = 23 participants with full-syndrome and subsyndromal BED and n = 23 individually matched healt...